SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 23
2.3. Sobibór in Official Historiography and
“Holocaust” Literature
The uninitiated will no doubt assume that a great number of scientific
studies have been made on the subject of Sobibór. This is not at all
the case, though. The literature concerning this camp is sparse, and
most of the existing books are novelistic if not fictional. The book list in
the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust has only four entries under the heading
of “Sobibór.” 20 In the light of the enormity of the crimes ascribed to
the camp by the official version of history, this is surprising, to say the
least.
We will now give an overview of the way Sobibór has been described
by orthodox historiography and by the “Holocaust” literature in
the period since 1946. 21
2.3.1. N. Blumental’s Documents and Materials (1946)
The first representation of the Sobibór camp with any claim for
scientific procedure dates from 1946. At that time a documentation was
edited in Poland by N. Blumental, the title of which, translated into
English, is “Documents and materials from the time of the German occupation
of Poland.” The first volume of this series contains 15 pages
dealing with Sobibór: one and a half pages of introduction by the editor
followed by the accounts of two former Sobibór detainees, Leon Feldhendler
and Zelda Metz: 22
“The death camp in the district of Lublin was set up during the
first half of 1942. The first transport probably arrived in April or
May. It was a typical extermination camp – complete with gas
chambers, open-air incineration of the corpses, etc. Furthermore, a
specialty of this camp was animal husbandry and the raising of
poultry by the camp commander; surviving detainees have stated
that during the ‘Aktionen’ the birds would be excited so that their
honking would drown out the people’s screams. [23] There were work-
20 Yitzhak Arad, Be��ec, Sobibór, Treblinka (1987); Miriam Novitch (ed.), Sobibór: Martyrdom
and Revolt (1980); Richard Rashke, Escape from Sobibor (1982); Adalbert
Rückerl, NS-Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse (1977).
21 Because of our ignorance of Hebrew and Yiddish, we have not been able to consider
works that have been published only in one of these languages.
22 Nachman Blumental (ed.), Dokumenty i Materia�y z czasów okupacji niemieckiej w
Polsce. Obozy. vol. 1, �od� 1946, pp. 199-214, here quoted pp. 199f. of the introduction.
23 The inventor of this silly story is Alexander Aronovitch Pechersky. Cf. section 4.2.